false 3 0 false false Thu Mar 20 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Feb 20 05:45:38 -0800 2008 Tue Mar 25 11:36:22 -0700 2008
A while back, not long before I finished The Man Who Saw His Own Liver, I tossed off a comment that called it “preachy.” Chip Smith, the guy who runs Nine-Banded Books (an imprint, by the by, that libertarians and other disgruntled conservatives will be well-rewarded if they monitor, judging by the first few books on the slate), responded by saying “You're not alone in being put off by Bradley's purported pedantry, although I must say that this interpretation somewhat befuddles me, since I've come to see the book as being almost apolitical, or at least too quixotically personal to be of much use for libertarians and tax resisters.” Now I'll admit that I probably hadn't thought the comment through; “preachy” was probably not the correct word there (it's certainly not in the same subtle-as-an-iron-mallet league as, say, Nelson's The Girl Who Owned a City). “Didactic” would probably have been a better choice. And I rush to add that I say this while wholeheartedly agreeing with much of Smith's thesis here, though I do believe he puts a lot more stock in the possibility of a nuclear holocaust than was ever really justified (that could well have to do with the time the play on which the novel is based was originally written, at the height of the cold war). I just have a problem with authors breaking the fourth wall, as it were; stopping the narrative in order to say “hey, reader, I want you to understand that I'm saying X, Y, and Z.” There's a reason “show, don't tell” is a hoary old publishing cliche-- it's because when you tell, you're stopping the reader from looking at what's being said and drawing his own conclusions. If you've gotten your point across effectively (as, I believe, Smith does here), the telling portion of the tale is simply redundant.

None of this is to say that the book is not worth reading. Smith's slim volume, a novelization of his own play The Man Who Stopped Paying, has the feel of Ludwig von Mises passed through the filter of, say, Errol Morris (or, in his artier stages, Roman Polanski); if you're seeing this in your head while you read, this is a book whose internal pictures invite long, slow camera pans over the garage where the entire narrative is set. There's a guy, and he's talking. Reminiscing, mostly, though as I mentioned above he does stop every once in a while and go off on a “and then I realized...” binge. They're small, though, and Smith's narrator does spend most of the novel's length simply relating events from his past. This is often a tough sell where a book is concerned; after all, it's just a guy talking. But it can be done, and done well (look at King's Dolores Claiborne, for example).

I think that come of the things Bradley Smith has to say are worth spending a good deal of time thinking about, and I also think that he does a generally good job of conveying those things here. I can't wholeheartedly recommend the book, as much because it's a vertical-market title as because of the deficiencies of the narrative; there are a lot of folks who will simply be turned off by the subject matter. Tax protesting is not a very popular subject these days, though for the life of me I can't understand why. But if you do have an interest in the subject, or if you have an interest in finding out more about the mindset of those of us who have an interest in the subject, this one's worth looking into. You also get the satisfaction of supporting a small independent press, which is oftentimes its own reward. ***
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